{"id":2347,"date":"2010-03-11T10:29:02","date_gmt":"2010-03-11T17:29:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2010\/03\/how-long-before-dr-drew-starts-picking-over-the-corpse-of-corey-haim\/"},"modified":"2010-03-11T10:29:02","modified_gmt":"2010-03-11T17:29:02","slug":"how-long-before-dr-drew-starts-picking-over-the-corpse-of-corey-haim","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2010\/03\/11\/how-long-before-dr-drew-starts-picking-over-the-corpse-of-corey-haim\/","title":{"rendered":"How Long Before Dr. Drew Starts Picking Over The Corpse Of Corey Haim"},"content":{"rendered":"

from New York Press<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Haim On You, Dr. Drew<\/h1>\n

Posted By: Tony O’Neill<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

\"-\"<\/a> They say there are certain inevitabilities in life. As the old clich\u00e9 goes taxes and death are two of them, and here\u2019s another: As soon as a celebrity dies of a drug overdose, Dr. Drew Pinsky will appear on my television screen before the body has even had time to cool, trying to sell whatever reality show crap he\u2019s hustling this week.<\/p>\n

Corey Haim died this morning of an overdose. If Dr Drew hasn\u2019t already booked himself on The View<\/em> before I am even done typing this, I\u2019m taking bets on how long it is before he appears, like a grave robber relieving the corpse of gold teeth, to give his usual sales pitch, all dressed up as a faux-concerned \u201cAlthough Corey Haim wasn\u2019t a patient of mine, blah blah blah\u201d speech. I have many problems with Dr. Drew. The first is that he is rather indiscriminate about who he decides is an addict. Anybody who has ever smoked pot, drank booze or even had sex is apparently an addict, so long as they are desperate enough to debase themselves on one of his reality shows. This season on Celebrity Rehab<\/em>, as well as having real addicts like Mike Starr from Alice in Chains, and Tom Sizemore, we also had people like Kari Ann Peniche (best known for, uh, being in Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew<\/em>) who was there because she knew how to play the role of the reality show villain really well, and Lisa D’Amato who was apparently a contestant on America\u2019s Next Top Model<\/em>, who liked to have a drink now and then. She wasn\u2019t as hilariously pouty or dramatic as Ms. Peniche, so I guess they needed D\u2019Amato to make up numbers.<\/p>\n

This dearth of actual addicts is not just because it\u2019s season three and Drew is running out of fresh meat. In season one he had Jaimee Foxworth from Family Matters<\/em>, in rehab supposedly because she was \u201caddicted\u201d to marijuana. (Her appearance on this reality show was nothing to do with her porno career tanking, I\u2019ll bet.) When she came in Drew warned her\u2014with a straight face, no less\u2014that she might expect some \u201cheroin-like\u201d withdrawal effects when she stopped smoking. Which might have played in the 1930s when all most people knew about pot came from the insane fantasies of Harry J. Anslinger and movies like Reefer Madness<\/em>, but in 2010 a statement like that just serves to totally undermine whatever credibility the doctor has. Remember this is a man who appeared in Wild Hogs <\/em>with Tim Allen, so he doesn\u2019t have a whole lot to start off with.<\/p>\n

But no, instead of getting into all of that\u2014which is a whole article in and of itself\u2014lets just sit back in wonder at the shamelessness of a man who thinks that news of another untimely celebrity death is the perfect opportunity to boost his ratings. If anyone has actually gone though rehab (full disclosure: I have, for a monstrous heroin\/crack\/meth rampage which took up most of my late teens and twenties) they will know that the rehab in Celebrity Rehab<\/em> bears no more resemblance to a real rehab than the set of Rock of Love: Charm School<\/em> did to a Swedish finishing school for young ladies. Instead what we see on Celebrity Rehab<\/em> is more like a drug den for people whose addiction is to being on TV. And Dr. Drew, for all of his empathetic looks, nods and pseudo-wisdom on the subject of addiction is not the dispassionate clinician he likes to portray, but the instead the dealer, doling out another hit of public exposure and kinda-sorta fame to his jonseing clients.<\/p>\n

I would love to see what Dr Drew thinks of prohibition itself, and whether he thinks that lives could be saved be decriminalizing drug use and moving to a more progressive position on the whole matter. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that prescribing heroin to heroin addicts leads to much better success rates than either methadone or prison, and that criminalizing a huge segment of our population for smoking an herb as benign as marijuana is costly, counterproductive and ineffective. But just like the drug cartels and the politicians, the Dr. Drews of this world need the status quo to be preserved. After all, in a post-prohibition society Dr. Drew couldn\u2019t build his empire by pathologizing and exploiting drug users. Maybe then he could get back to what he was best at: sitting around with Adam Corolla and telling us whether we really can catch crabs from toilet seats.<\/p>\n

Tony O\u2019Neill is the author of the novels <\/em>Down and Out in Murder Mile and the forthcoming <\/em>Sick City.<\/em><\/p>\n

[ click to read at NYPress.com<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from New York Press Haim On You, Dr. Drew Posted By: Tony O’Neill They say there are certain inevitabilities in life. As the old clich\u00e9 goes taxes and death are two of them, and here\u2019s another: As soon as a celebrity dies of a drug overdose, Dr. Drew Pinsky will appear on my television screen […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2347\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}